WordPress Redirection Plugin

This blog is undergoing some changes.There is some content (like the zabbix pages) that I can no longer maintain since I no longer use them in my day-job. To keep everything working seamlessly, I wanted to create some 302 (permanently moved) redirectors for the content that I was taking down. In the past, I used a plugin called “smart 404” to intelligently redirect visitors to a good page instead of the dummy standard 404 page. Unfortunately, It looks like smart 404 is having some trouble in newer WordPress versions and wouldn’t create a smart suggestions on my 404 page.

Enter Redirection. Redirection gives you a menu in the admin interface which allows you to easily create and maintain 301 and 302 redirections (among other features). Here is a screenshot of what it looks like once activated:

From the screenshot, you can see that I was able to create a simple 301 redirect from a page on my WordPress instance to an external website where the content will live from now on. The second rule allowed me to match the URL using a regular expression and redirect it to another page on my site. This is a great piece of software.

One issue I ran into when testing the plugin was that edits I made did not seem to be taking effect. This turned out to simply be my browser caching the 301 response. I recommend that you either manually clear the cache or download the web developer toolbar and disable cache. I should also note that my server runs nginx and not the Apache web server. I simply deleted the redirection ‘module’ for Apache which attempts to create .htaccess rules to perform the redirections. Without the Apache module, WordPress handles the redirections.